In Uganda, in a scene worthy of an Evelyn Waugh novel, educators at Kampala University this week watched in sorrow as their files, furniture, computers, textbooks, office stationery and other scholastic materials were loaded into three lorries and driven away to parts unknown.

The materials were taken from the campus to allow for the setting up of a new university in the existing one's stead. The new institution will be called Kampala International University.

But few at the old university knew where their materials were being taken to - vice-chancellor Badru Kateregga, who arranged for the removal vans, was not saying - and what was to become of the hundreds of students at the existing institution who are now without a university. Dr Kateregga has since said he will create another Kampala University, but he has not said where it will be or who will be granted admission.

"The former students are still in suspense," an editorial comment in New Vision noted, adding the status of both universities was "still a matter of contention" at an official level.

The paper revealed the new buyers had neither formally received a license to begin teaching, nor named more than two of the senior university officials expected to serve at the new university. The ever more enigmatic former vice-chancellor continued to shroud the whereabouts of the former university. "Only time will tell whether his former students will follow him," the paper concluded helplessly.

In South Korea, "the public education system is on the verge of collapse", the Korea Times announced, not for the first time, in an editorial.

High school students sleep through the day and scuffle with scolding teachers, it complained, adding the resultant "uniform mediocrity of students" was in part attributable to efforts by the government over the past 27 years to streamline school education into a "one-system-fits-all" policy, aimed at abolishing entrance exam hell for prospective university students.

Instead, said the paper, the wealthiest among the students now simply look to private tutors to supply the kind of teaching the state no longer provides.

"But this seems to be the area in which critical thinking and creative minds should replace forced equality and cookie-cutter uniformity," the paper said of the public system in South Korea. "We need to maximise students' potential to help make their lives more fruitful, if not for just their employability and the state's competitiveness."

The Times doubted whether this will ever really happen, and for that it blamed the country's oversubscribed higher education system.

"All these problems can be traced back to the nation's universities," it said. "The extreme gap between educational demand and supply has long made the entrance to first-class universities a life-or-death affair."

In Australia, a court has ruled that an academic, summarily fired from a leading university after voicing concerns about grade inflation be reinstated.

The case, described by local unions as a trendsetter in higher education and led to calls for British academics to boycott the offending institution, involved Ted Steele, an associate professor of microbiology at the University of Wollongong, in New South Wales. Dr Steele, who had lectured at the institution for 16 years, was dismissed without warning on February 26, after he suggested in a newspaper interview that he had been pressured to upgrade his students' marks.

The judgment "can only be seen as an indictment of the university's failure to treat Dr Steele fairly, and as a powerful warning to other universities against similar behaviour undercutting academic freedom and freedom of speech," said the Sydney Morning Herald. On a more internationally pertinent note, the paper pointed out that concerns about grade inflation in Australia are hardly confined to Wollongong: at least five of the country's vice-chancellors have now gone on record as saying the Australian system was "in crisis".

It added: "The problem of maintaining standards is widespread and is a result of the corporatist pressures all universities have come to face. That, not personal vindictiveness, is the approach the University of Wollongong should be taking."

Algebra for Adulterers? Or, in the cogent words of Slate magazine, "What every philandering politician and travelling salesman should know about the odds of getting caught."

A scholastic think-piece, of sorts, addressing this very theme, written by Jordan Ellenberg, an assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton University, appeared on the publication's website earlier today.

As pretty well every news watcher on the planet knows by now, Chandra Levy, a young intern in Washington, mysteriously vanished from her apartment, in May, shortly before she was due to attend a university graduation ceremony in California. A US congressman, Gary Condit, has spent much of the time since then issuing less than convincing statements about the true nature of his relationship with the young woman.

Slightly less well reported, however, was a conversation between Ms Levy's mother and her gardener, in which both parents were said to have simultaneously discovered their respective daughters had had affairs with Mr Condit. The gardener has subsequently denied the conversation ever took place.

But Dr Ellenberg wasn't so much interested in the moral dimensions of this titbit than in the mathematical probabilities of such a conversation ever taking place - not just in California, but anywhere. Here's a typical paragraph from the scholar's musing:

"Let g be the number of girlfriends the congressman has; then the number of pairs of mothers he has to worry about is about (1/2)g2. How did I determine that? To specify a pair of mothers, we have to specify Mom 1 and Mom 2. There are g choices for Mom 1. For each of these choices, there are g - 1 (which is approximately g) choices for Mom 2. So, there are g2 possible pairings of mothers in all. But because we've counted both (Mom 1, Mom 2) and (Mom 2, Mom 1) as pairings, the number of different pairs is about (1/2)g2. To be precise, the exact number is (1/2)g(g - 1), [and] if you think fathers are as talkative as mothers, you should multiply our figure by 4 to get 2g2 pairs of parents."